Michael Fry: Originality - a much overrated quality in a writer

IT WAS one of those maxims at school that has never left me: "Plagiarise, plagiarise, let no-one's work escape your eyes". The maxim came not from the masters, who in those days were still given to some unfathomable Victorian expressions: "play up, play up and play the game" or "never let your ardour cool for the honour of the school". No, it was a piece of schoolboy wisdom and, like much else of that genre, wiser than those who uttered it knew.

For surely the whole process of education is, in a certain sense, an exercise in plagiarism. Among the aims is to take the fertile but empty young mind and fill it with accumulated knowledge or expertise from the past and the present, making that mind ready to apply the lessons in its own future.

The young mind is not expected to contribute anything original of its own, but to learn from what other minds had learned before it with much more trouble.

Heavens above, it has always been hard enough to persuade the young mind, distracted by sex, by football or nowadays by computer games, to absorb matter so obviously healthier for it. Often that matter can be most easily absorbed in terms quickly familiar because readily parroted: times tables, capes and bays, amo amas amat. Were kids worse educated in the old days when they used to learn a lot of the educational elements by rote? I doubt it - or at least I find it better that they should have learned these things by rote than, in the modern mode, not to have learned them at all.

This - call it mastery of material - can only be the most basic foundation, the most rudimentary preparation for greater independence of mind. Leaving aside the point that the modern British masses, with their fixations on game shows and package holidays, will never show much independence of mind anyway, it seems unwise to expect too much of the students who rise from, and in most cases will return to, the bosom of those masses, no doubt to grow richer than, but without differentiating themselves culturally from, the rest of the society they live in.

What we can sensibly ask of students in their education, at least at the undergraduate level, is that they should acquire a wider range of skills in learning, evaluating and applying the accumulated knowledge or expertise in a chosen subject of use to their society. Only the tiniest elite of 20-year-olds are ever going to be original. And if they are not going to be original, they are going to plagiarise.

The reluctance to accept this point comes to us, like much other politically correct madness, from America.American education is a matter of mass production, as well as being highly competitive, like the civilisation from which it springs: no dreaming spires there. Academics are forced to carve out a niche and guard it like hawks. And along with the rest of their countrymen, they will sue. That is how the fashion for litigation against plagiarism started, giving rise to an apparatus of surveillance and control which has now spread here. The University of Edinburgh, for example, boasts an officer specifically charged with sniffing out plagiarism, about the creepiest job I ever heard of.

Here is some news for that officer, who also has jurisdiction over me: I plagiarise, always have and, I trust, always will. It may be one of my little foibles, but I like pithy turns of phrase. If I come across one, I can seldom forbear to make my own use of it. Here is an example. In my history of Edinburgh, I open the section on the War of Independence with this: "In that Edinburgh (of 16 March 1286] Alexander III, King of Scots, sat in the castle drinking his blood-red wine." I lifted the line straight from Geoffrey Barrow, who of course himself took it from the wonderful (but anonymous) ballad of Sir Patrick Spens. But he was the first to do so, and I just copied him.

I do not repent. The question I asked myself at the time of writing was not "Has somebody used this phrase in this context before?", but "What is the very best way to start this section?" I found no way round the formulation that Professor Barrow had hit on. If forced to defend myself, I would say my imitation was rather a tribute to his good literary taste. Knowledge that I am not alone fortifies me in this view. In fact I have an informal arrangement with somebody I had better just describe as another Scottish writer: each is quite happy for the other to plagiarise from himself. An author's life is often a dog's one - the endless hours of solitary labour, the difficulty of sharing problems, the demands of editors and publishers, the malicious reviews, the meagre monetary reward. All that, and you have to master every aspect of often complex subject matter as well. Or do you? Surely, given these burdens on writers, we should be indulged if from time to time we ease them with a little plagiarism. We, too, are only human.

Nor am I and my brother scribe alone. The notion that the writer has to be original is relatively recent, a romantic one from the 19th century, coupled with the fiction of his being set apart from the common herd of humanity, a unique genius who is, or should be, inimitable - except by the lesser beings who expose themselves as such when they do try to imitate him.

Contemporary Gaelic poets of the 16th century regarded plagiarism as an even higher virtue.Their job was expressly not to have ideas of their own but to tell all the old tales as well as they could, at most geared to a particular audience at a particular time - or else to recite to that smalltime thug, their clan chief, lies about how great he was. This is a far cry from today's undergraduate essay, but the same point holds.

If students just crib the whole lot off the internet, then by all means censure them - they must in any case be pretty stupid when their teachers have access to the internet, too. But as for a phrase, or a sentence, even a paragraph or a whole argument, let students rather be praised for having understood and incorporated it into their work, if that is indeed what they have succeeded in doing.